Quotes About Complexity

I write a world where everyone is partly right.

Never, never have a famous partner. It's too complicated.

The writer, Ruth Jhabvala, livedin India but was German. My partner Ismail Merchant was from Bombay but was educated in England and he had a different view on the world. Probably they had to contend with some sort of Oregonian-ness in me that they didn't understand and didn't know where it was coming from.

Sexuality is one of the biggest parts of who we are.

Divide each difficulty into as many parts as is feasible and necessary to resolve it.

I try to write parts for women that are as complicated and interesting as women actually are.

An economy is not a complicated thing; it just has a lot of moving parts.

Nothing is ever simple. What do you do when you discover you like parts of the role you're trying to escape?

The Labour party has, from the beginning, been made up of diverse factions; that's its beauty - asking it to become cohesive is like trying to find one shampoo that will care for the hair of everybody in Angelina Jolie's house.

But we have to pass the bill so you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy.

I led the fight for the Clinton health care plan in 1994. We failed. I learned from that experience. What I learned is you can't pass a complicated government-run plan.

T]he "Law Of Frequency Of Error". . . reigns with serenity and in complete self-effacement amidst the wildest confusion. The huger the mob . . . the more perfect is its sway. It is the supreme law of Unreason. Whenever a large sample of chaotic elements are taken in hand . . . an unsuspected and most beautiful form of regularity proves to have been latent all along.13

The only simplicity for which I would give a straw is that which is on the other side of the complex—not that which never has divined it. —OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, JR. There

F. Scott Fitzgerald said, "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

The real agent of change is not computers per se but rather the computation that we are installing into even the most mundane constituents of our everyday surroundings. As we have seen, we are at the point that it is now often cheaper to manufacture digital information processing into an object than it to leave it out. Microelectronics permit even trivial products to be deeply complex and connectible—and that is both the promise and the problem. That

If we see each problem—be it water shortages, climate change, or poverty—as separate, and approach each separately, the solutions we come up with will be short-term, often opportunistic, "quick fixes" that do nothing to address deeper imbalances.

vision without systems thinking ends up painting lovely pictures of the future with no deep understanding of the forces that must be mastered to move from here to there.

I imagined a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future and in some way involve the stars." –Jorge Luis Borges

Translation is like love; I do not know what it is but I think I know what it is not.

Haven't you sometimes thought that people's vices are often the only things that make them interesting?

it would seem almost impossible to argue that the biblical narrative is a calm, clear, and uncontentious text. Rather, the Scriptures reach our ears in an often ominous and scandalous tone. From the opening pages of this ancient text, we are confronted with a shocking series of ambiguous stories and complex conflicts that defy easy categorization and interpretation.

In a simple system, if I pull a lever, I get the expected result. If I turn my wheel, the car turns. In a more complex system, I turn the wheel and there may be a very large amount of lag time.

Norvig: I think one of the most important things is being able to keep everything in your head at once. If you can do that you have a much better chance of being successful. That makes a small program easier. For a bigger program, you need extra tools to be able to handle that.

There's a brilliant quote by Tony Hoare in his Turing Award speech about how there are two ways to design a system: "One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.